Inforbix and the engineering to manufacturing interplay

Engineering and manufacturing are two absolutely important functions in every manufacturing company. At the same time, a simple truth is that communication and the relationship between these two functions is complicated. I’d say it’s a “love and hate” relationship. Would you agree? The good news is that to improve communication between engineering to manufacturing all that is required is an improved information flow.

Engineers often have the tendency to keep stuff close to their chest. Moreover, because engineers are so busy, they tend to miss deadlines. Or forget to let others know of changes. It’s not intentional. In the meantime, manufacturing engineers require access to engineering information as soon as possible. Delays mean big problems for them. Fortunately, Inforbix can help. Here are a few screen shots that show how:

1. Find a specific drawing you are working on as an engineer using Search. Here are the search results for a particular SolidWorks drawing:

Drawing snippet

2. Now create a virtual table from the drawing BOM that is easily extracted by Inforbix from the SolidWorks drawing. The first pic shows the BOM data snippet of the BOM table extracted by Inforbix with one click. The second pic is of the drawing BOM Inforbix created by a few clicks:

Drawing tables

Bom table

3. Now the drawing BOM is ready to be shared with one or more (you decide) manufacturing engineer(s). This pic shows how the drawing BOM table is shared from the My Stuff app:

Share bom table

4. From this moment on, every change made by anyone to this BOM will automatically be reflected on the manufacturing engineer’s Dashboard.

Conclusion. The interplay between engineering manufacturing is a complicated love-hate story. Inforbix helps improve this interplay by improving the flow of up-to-date data between the two. This can serve as a big benefit to manufacturing companies of all sizes. Want to try Inforbix and see the information flow between your engineering and manufacturing departments improve? Then give Inforbix a test-drive or register to use Inforbix for free with your data.